Prepare to Oppose Trump’s Immigrant Purge

All indications are that President-elect Donald Trump has every intention of following through on his promise to ramp up deportations, suspend due process, and restrict legal status for millions of people living in the United States. These include the children of immigrants, survivors of domestic violence, and skilled foreign-born tech workers. He and his newly anointed deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, claim this will ultimately help the average American worker. 

The truth is that mass deportations are bad for the economy and would be devastating for our communities. 

Already, homebuilders are warning about the economic consequences of mass deportations, as they will rob the industry of essential skilled workers. Restaurants will lose long-tenured staff. Textile and furniture factories in my home state of North Carolina like the ones my parents worked at will have to pause or shut down. Local governments will start to buckle after suffering steep drops in revenue from sales and property taxes. 

The result will be an economic shock comparable to that of the pandemic—only this time, it will be entirely self-inflicted. This isn’t hyperbolic or speculative. Past immigration raids, many of which occurred during the last Trump Administration, caused chaos in Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas. After a single large immigration raid in Postville, Iowa resulted in the arrests of 389 of its 2,000 residents, the town fell into an economic down spiral. 

And before you believe claims that the next purge will primarily target criminal gangs, recall that Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “Border Czar,” made that exact same promise during his tenure as director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the first Trump Administration. The vast majority of those detained during that time lacked a criminal record. 

Indeed, during Trump’s first term, immigration authorities had so much trouble meeting their newly inflated detention quotas that they created absurd rules to boost deportation numbers, such as one requiring the incarceration of pregnant women. This was accomplished by generating “collateral” arrests, meaning that if authorities failed to find the person they were looking for, they would detain anyone they encountered who couldn’t prove their legal status. Nearly everyone I know who was detained in 2018 and 2019 was a “collateral” arrest.

Immigrants were arrested in their neighborhoods, at work, and even during routine legal check-ins. Several of my neighbors chose to live in churches rather than “self-deport” away from their families. To stay under the radar, immigrants avoided any interaction with authorities, even in emergencies. Friends of mine who worked as painters, tutors, and in restaurants were arrested at random. These raids shattered communities and devastated businesses.

We don’t know exactly how the plans will unfold this time around, but it’s a safe bet that millions of Trump voters will be shocked to realize their neighbors, coworkers, and children’s classmates are now at risk. The American Immigration Council estimates that there were eleven million undocumented adults in the United States as of 2022, and an additional 2.3 million without legal status were allowed to enter and stay in the U.S. pending their immigration court hearings. Those thirteen million people know and work alongside millions of others who voted for Trump. 

In 2016, many immigrants and immigrant defenders felt alone and without resources. But by the end of Trump’s first term, the immigrant rights group for which I work, Siembra NC, had trained 700 people for an ICE Watch program across six counties. It also provided emergency aid to immigrant families and pressured sheriffs to stop cooperating with ICE. People learned how to defend their rights, run wage-theft and 24-hour detention hotlines, and resist deportation. 

We can scale these support networks by expanding our sense of who “our people” are—because, to be sure, there will be more of us willing to stand up for those who are targeted. We have an opportunity to protect the people with whom we share our neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools, and not allow the chaos of detentions to tear apart the relationships woven into our lives. 

Who do you know for whom, and with whom, you can start building a support network for your community?

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.